"It is not by walls that a country is defended, but by the courage of its soldiers."

-- Robert Blondel

La Triviata

During live fire exercies off Portsmouth in 1947, gunners of the destroyer HMS Saintes demonstrated how out of practice they were by missing the towed target and sinking the tug HMS Buccaneer.

James Reese Europe, the famed black bandmaster who introduced African-American music to white America in the early twentieth century, was first taught to play the violin and piano by Enrico Hurlei, Assistant Director of the U.S. Marine Corps Band under John Philip Sousa.

Of approximately 900 officers in the Guatemalan Army in 1963, 500 (55.6%) ranked as lieutenant-colonels or higher, while only 50 (5.6%) were lieutenants.

During a campaign against the Latins in the fourth century B.C., the Roman Consul Titus Manlius Torquatus awarded his son the civic crown for courage in winning a battle, and then had him executed for doing so despite instructions prohibiting an engagement without specific orders.

On October 10, 1905, Ensign Ernest J. King, USN, married Miss Martha L. Egerton in the Cadet Chapel, but not the one at Annapolis, the one at West Point!.

In late 1944, following four years of German occupation, young children in France sometimes had difficulties when they attempted to salute liberating Allied troops, often rendering the stiff-armed Nazi version before flipping up their fingers to give a "V for Victory" sign.

The shipboard death rate among British troops sent to the West Indies during the American Revolution was 10.8%, while that for horses fully 43.3%.

During World War I the French conscripted 21-percent of their populace, of whom 47-percent became casualties, a fifth of them killed in battle.